Went and looked at B5 Wars at local game store (not for sale, only a demo).
wrote down the weapons on the Omega class which I take to be
'semi-official'
(I've learned that unless you hear it straight out of JMS's mouth, don't
believe it.). Here are the weapons and some comments on each in order of
power, most to least.
Heavy Laser Cannon These are the big beam weapons. 2 are mounted fore and 2
aft. The game says they may onyle fire through the hex row directly ahead and
behing the ship, plus the hex row on either side. These are only offensive
weapons. The rules give them the ability to do a sustained fire. Not quite
sure what this is, didn't get into the rules that far.
Heavy Pulse Cannon These are the ones located one on either side of the bow
openning. They
have 60 degree arcs of port-fore and starboard-fore. These may be used
as defensive weapons (Interceptor mode) to knock out incoming fire, except for
lasers, as well as offensively against ships. Each may not do both on the same
turn.
Standard Particle Cannon There are six located on the port and six on the
starboard side of the ship. Each side has a 180 degree firing arc, from the
hex row directly ahead to the row of hexes directly behind. They may be used
in Interceptor mode as above, or offensivly.
Intercepters There are a total of 6 located aroung the ship. Firing arcs are
180 degrees
each. #1: starboard-fore, port-fore, port #2: port-fore, port, port-aft
#3:
port, port-aft, starboard-aft #4:port-aft, starboard-aft, starboard
#5:
starboard-aft, starboard, starboard-fore #6 starboard, starboard-fore,
port-fore As offensive weapons they may only attack fighters and
shuttles. As defensive weapons they form an 'energy web' which lowers the
chance to hit the ship with all weapons. this sounds like they act like a
screen does in FT.
The Omega class also is shown to carry 24 fighters.
Comments in the background area say 'Flying an EA ship is like stearing a cast
iron tub full of water.' Not very manueverable are they? But carry a
lot more armaments to-for-ton than the other races.
Well, that's it. BTW just finished watching 'Face of the Enemy', the episode
with the big battle at the beggining and Sheridan getting captured at the end.
During the battle I saw the Omegas and Hyperions, but there was a third
big ship with the front end of an Omega, a lattice-work structure, but
no rotating section. Does anyone know what this ship is?
Chan 'Actually, I would like a five-day pass to DisneyPlanet (tm)'
Faunce
> On Mon, 21 Jul 1997 ChanFaunce@aol.com wrote:
<snip lot's of good stuff that I wanted to read about Omega's>
> [quoted text omitted]
<snip lots of SPOILERS that I didn't want to read>
PLEASE mark spoiler posts as such...
-Michael
> Went and looked at B5 Wars at local game store (not for sale, only a
If you're patient, the Earthforce Sourcebook should be (operative phrase,
'should be') out right after GenCon. I had an opportunity to check out the
ship sheets they had at the Chameleon Eclectic booth, and was pleasantly
surprised to see how close my rendition of the Omegas are to Jon's. :-)
Not exact, no, but close. Close enough. ;-) I don't know what i can
and cannot talk about what I saw, so I'll err on the side of caution and not
say very much.
If you are thinking about converting the B5W game to FT stats, you might want
to not try and convert each and every weapon; you'll have no room left! You'll
want to do a representative substitution prolly, not a 1:1.
Oh, also, the AOG guys do have it pretty straight. They do consult with George
Johnsen and JMS about stuff. There are still mistakes, there are still
discrepencies, but all in all the ship info is pretty accurate.
I cannot speak for the ship info from the role-playing game, other than
there are differences in some minor items between the two systems (eg, class
names of ships, for example).
> Heavy Laser Cannon
Is verra nasty. ;-) Basically after you hit a target (assuming
nothing much has changed from the earlier draft versions of this) you don't
have to
reroll to lock-on next round/turn.
> Comments in the background area say 'Flying an EA ship is like stearing
Use the real vector movement system with 2 thrust to simulate this. ;-)
> Well, that's it. BTW just finished watching 'Face of the Enemy', the
[ deleted due to spoilerization ]
Not to be a fly in the ointment, but our counterparts across the pond and
elsewhere in the world haven't seen this yet; you might want to announce in
the future when you're about to throw in spoilers and
> ...but there was a third
I'll have to go back and check, but I *think* that was the 'gunship' (stats if
not already in the B5W game will be in the supplement; I still haven't had a
lot of time to plow through my copy of B5W yet). Predecessor to the Omegas,
iifc.
Mk
> Well, that's it. BTW just finished watching 'Face of the Enemy',
Um...Can you be a bit more careful about the B5 references..The 4th season
doesn't start here till Wednesday night on Channel 4. I'm not that annoyed
since I've managed to screw up like this too. I do know that some of the
people here get very irriatated with B5 spoilers. I think one person even left
the list because I forget to put spoiler space in the message. If you do
include them please indicate it with a message in the subject line and
probably some spoiler space too. Just out of courtesy for us B5 starved people
over here.